


can't be unlearned

by groundedsaucer (coasterchild)



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: Abuse, Basically Erik goes through some Things, But They're Working Through It, Child Neglect, Cruelty, F/M, Neglect, Strangulation, Trauma, it's really not terribly graphic I just tagged it to be safe, the erik/christine is mostly implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:42:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24258361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coasterchild/pseuds/groundedsaucer
Summary: The ~Tragique~ Backstory (missing scene forto be sound or to feel saved again)
Relationships: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera
Comments: 2
Kudos: 29





	can't be unlearned

**Author's Note:**

> Like it says on the tin, this is my version of Erik's tragic backstory. My intention was to make something that was canon compliant with the musical without pulling from the books (Leroux, Kay, etc). 
> 
> This is framed as a sort of missing scene from my Christine/Erik fic _to be sound or to feel saved again_ (found here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24134092/chapters/58107508 ), meant to take place between chapters 2 and 3. You don't HAVE to read the fic to understand this, or vice versa, but I think it's a good insight into where Erik's coming from if you have.

“Because I want to know you. You already know so much of my life, and if you asked more I would tell you. But _you_ are a mystery.”

“It is an ugly story.”

“I’m not afraid.”

Wringing his hands together, Erik bowed his head. He started from the beginning.

\---

_I am told that when I was born, when the blood and effluvia were wiped away only to reveal a face twisted as you see before you, my mother fainted straight away._

_When I was older, I would hear my parents fight. My father would blame her poor breeding for my deformities. He would blame her soft heart for not letting the midwives take me away that first night. I was kept in a room, hardly leaving lest someone spread rumors of a foul bloodline. When I was young, I would wail. I would cry in the night, old enough to speak but hardly able, as almost no one had spoken to me. It drove my mother to tears and my father to rage._

_To occupy my troubled mind, mother brought in a governess, a string of tutors. I always wore a mask, so as not to frighten them away. They taught me to read, to write. Suddenly the whole of my family’s library was my domain. One tutor made note of my quick study and endeavored to teach me music. I learned piano. I learned to sing. I learned how music was written, and I practiced night and day._

_In the evenings my mother would sometimes listen, sitting just outside the door. She would tell me I had done well. That I had created something beautiful._

_I learned to do other things. I studied the sciences, began designing structures and devices, never having the ability to test them out, bound as I was to the realm of words on the page. My mother would sometimes leave periodicals and newspapers for me to peruse, although current events hardly affected me. In these I would read about great living men, not the ancient thinkers in my books. Men of science, of music, of art. Some of them worked in Paris. It wasn’t long before I began sending out letters to these men. I would send them my admiration, and, sometimes, things that I had created in their field of study. Building plans, schematics, sheet music. My mother had found my playing to be worthy of some affection, perhaps these men would find value in my creations as well._

_I did occasionally receive replies. Some were dismissive or even rude, but some--enough--of them were encouraging. They were curious about me, just a teenage boy at that time, and some expressed interest in meeting me._

_My parents forbid it. I was their most carefully guarded secret, and letting me rub elbows with influential people was too dangerous a wager. They had other children by now, all of them presumably perfect in the ways I was not, although I did not meet them. They lived in another home, only visiting occasionally. I would hear them speaking through the vents. They would ask about the music they heard from the library, and Mother would tell them it was only a ghost._

_It was when I received a letter from a duke living in Paris that I made my decision. I was 17 years old, and he offered me a contract to design a theater for him. He offered a fee that seemed quite generous to my naive sense of the world, and I could not bear to refuse, no matter what my family wished._

_I had studied maps of the city, and one night I broke out a window and stole a horse. I left that lonely place behind me without so much as a note, and I can only assume my parents took it as a blessing._

_I found the duke and he welcomed me. He was surprised at my youth, and the mask over my face--perhaps not in that order. But I proved to him the merits of my work, and he did what he promised. Not only that, the work I did for him opened doors to more, my clientele often hailing from nobility, and, in one case, royalty. The Shah of Persia appreciated my work so much that in addition to my fee he sent along a crate full of inventions from the East, feeling as though I might find some interest in them. I passed many hours studying them, learning their intricacies so that I might incorporate them into my own work._

_With the rates I collected I was able to keep my own modest rooms. Much of my correspondence took place through post, so I did not often venture out into the wider world. Growing up in such isolation, crowds of people filled me with unease. I learned out of habit to do what I could at night, when the streets were emptier._

_It was on one such night that a man, jovially drunk and not watching where he went, knocked into me so hard that both of us fell upon the cobblestones. My mask, a plain piece of leather at that time, fell to the ground from the impact. I scrambled to retrieve it, but in the time I took to return it to its place, the man had already glimpsed the secret it hid. At the time I believed the smile that spread across his face to be a friendly one. He offered me a hand up, apologized, and offered a drink at a nearby pub._

_I often think back on that offer, on how foolish I was to accept a simple kindness so naively._

_We drank together, and soon, far sooner than I would have thought, I could hardly hold my head up. Two men lifted me from my chair and walked me out the door, assuring the few patrons left that they would get me home all right. They walked me to a carriage, and from that carriage they walked me into a cage._

_These men, much less amicable in the cold light of day, greeted me in the morning with a bucket of water. I had vomited on myself in the stupor of the previous night, and they drenched me to wash it away, the cold sting of it only matched by the splitting headache roaring to life as I woke. My mask was gone, and scrambled to cover my face as the men laughed. They threw clothes to me, the sort you might find on a dancing monkey, and told me to put them on. I told them I wouldn’t, I spit at them, I demanded to be released. They left me, sitting behind bars with nothing more than straw on the floor to cushion me._

_No one brought food, or water, and the next morning I pleaded with them for anything to sate my thirst. They told me to put on the costume, and so I did._

_Some days later, a piano was placed with me. I had told the man--Mr. Magnanimous was his stage-name, referred to as Mag by most who took his orders--during our evening at the pub, that I was a musician, an architect, an aspiring engineer. He told me to play for him, and I did._

_Soon I was put on exhibit. Men, women, children would all come see the monstrous prodigy. I tried, early on, to beg my release, hoping one or more of my audience would take pity, demand it, but no one did, and Mr. Magnanimous told me if I tried it again he wouldn’t feed me for a week, and if I tried it after that he would cut out my tongue. His freak didn’t need to speak to make him money, so I didn’t try again._

_It became routine. I would perform for audiences, they would look on in fascinated horror. Mag told me I should snarl at them, like a beast, and so I did._

_Some years in, there was a woman. Her stark black hair at contrast with the bright golden curls of the little girl at her side. The girl looked at me and gasped, as many did, and the woman turned her away. She told her sternly that it is cruel to gawk at a man as though he is an animal. She ushered the small girl out, but the woman turned to me once before she was out of sight. She_ saw _me, properly. She looked into my eyes, as hardly another soul had managed in years._

_She never returned, and I saw so many faces in my time at that wretched carnival, but hers I never forgot. It was a reminder that under the costume and the sneers of my audience, I was a man. I might be a monster, but I was that too._

_I was there for over a decade. By the end I was no longer a lanky, trusting youth, and Mr. Magnanimous adjusted my public persona somewhat to match. I was now more of a brutish creature. Still made to perform for the novel contradiction of it, but when patrons stepped too close to the bars I would rattle the cage and bellow at them, primal and mortifying. I was billed as half man, half monster, and part of the allure was seeing which side you might encounter at any given visit._

_There were times when frightening the onlookers felt good. It felt _right_ that they should turn away, if not from shame then from fear. _

_Near the end of my time there, another carnival came to town. Mr. Magnanimous had apparently run afoul of its owner some years ago, and so the old man was worried he might extract his revenge in the form of sabotage or stolen attractions. One of Mag’s men, a large buffoon who spent most of what little money he made on drink, was instructed to keep watch over the area in which I resided at night. He could hardly keep his head up, and took to leaning against the bars of my cage, half asleep and muttering to himself._

_I hardly thought at all, only set to work as silently as I could manage. I tore strips of cloth from my costume and knotted them together until I had length enough to wrap around both hands with a solid 20 inches stretched between them. As my jailer snored, I snaked my hands through the bars, and with a strong yank I pinned him against them by the neck. He tried to call out, but I only pulled tighter, bringing my full weight to bear on his throat, and after a minute or so of thrashing, the man finally slumped. I stayed motionless for several moments, both to watch for any witnesses and to ensure the deed was done._

_I tied him off so that he hung there, looking to anyone at a distance like he was still standing at his post. I rifled through his pockets and found what I sought: the keys._

_Once free of the cage, I could have slipped away. A better man would have, but I found my way to the carriage where Mr. Magnanimous slept. I slipped in and I wrapped my hands around his throat as he struggled against me. I told him it was the man he should have feared, not the monster, and he went limp beneath me._

_Only then did I run. I took what money I could find in Mag’s room. I took shoes and clothes, and I ran far from that place._

_I found myself on the streets of Paris, cowering among the other people living on the streets. I dared not to show my face in any respectable establishment for fear that word of my deeds had spread to the authorities. I dug through garbage to eat, ducked into alleys to sleep. I knew no one who might help me, and was paralyzed by the fear of asking._

_It was pure coincidence when I saw her stark black hair again, twisted up on her head as it had been years ago. Fear again clenched my heart, but I was too hungry, too filthy and tired, to not_ try _._

_I reached out to her as she passed, calling “Madame?”_

_Her stern face turned on me, and as I looked up into the light, recognition--thank God!--spread over her expression._

_“You’re that man… the prodigy from the carnival.” she said, and I nodded. I begged her to help me. Rooms, food, anything she might have._

_She told me she could not board me herself--she did not know me, and had her daughter to think of--but she knew where I might at least find shelter. She--Madame Giry, I knew now--led me to the Opera Populaire, and showed me a space below that a man might hide away, never to be discovered._

_When the theater was empty I would sweep through the place and take what I needed. Madame Giry, checking in on me occasionally, mentioned that there were rumors of a ghost to account for all that had gone missing. This felt appropriate to me. It seemed only right that I become a specter of the man I might have been, had fate and men not conspired so cruelly to destroy him._

\---

The beginnings of tears had formed in the corners of her eyes, but Christine held them at bay. She took his hand in hers. “Thank you for telling me.”


End file.
